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Accused Montreal terror plotter Chiheb Esseghaier was evicted from his last known residence after months of complaints including praying so loudly his neighbours could not sleep, according to a report in La Presse.

Chiheb Esseghaier was arrested Monday while sitting at a McDonald’s restaurant inside Montreal’s central train station. (Chris Young / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

In the five days since RCMP anti-terrorism agents in Montreal arrested Chiheb Esseghaier on charges of conspiring to attack a VIA train on the Toronto-New York route, the two portraits of the man at the heart of probe into the Al Qaeda-led plot have clashed.

The 30-year-old Tunisian national was a cutting-edge PhD student working in the field of biosensors — using nanotechnology to treat disease — but neighbours at his former Montreal apartment recall a man so inept that he once lit his barbeque inside the apartment because it was too windy outside, according to Montreal’s La Presse. Another time, he used the four burners of his stove to dry his shirt.

“I went to see what was happening and I told him to turn them all off,” an unidentified neighbour said. “He told me that he needed his shirt to go to the university.”

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The incidents at Esseghaier’s apartment — from which he was evicted last December — set off smoke detectors but few alarm bells among those now stunned to hear about his alleged part in a two-man terror cell that police say received guidance and support from Al Qaeda elements in Iran.

But there were other signs that would foreshadow the trouble now facing the squat, heavily bearded man with a receding hairline, who insisted in court this week that the charges are based on “appearances” that he would be judged only by God’s law as spelled out in the Qur’an.

Since arriving at Quebec’s prestigious Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) in 2010, Esseghaier demanded that school authorities create a prayer room for him and some of the other Muslim students. Sometime later, was reportedly scolded for ripping down fundraising posters at the lab that contained a picture of a woman.

He prayed loudly and at all hours of the day, to the chagrin of neighbours, La Presse reported. He scolded a fellow Tunisian he met at a Montreal mosque, for paying Canadian taxes when all it served was to enrich the Canadian government.

“I didn’t really understand and wanted to say, ‘If you don’t like it, leave the country,’” Faouzi Bellili, a fellow INRS student told The Gazette in Montreal. “I realize he had a very different vision and that I was wasting my time talking to him.”

Where did that vision come from? It doesn’t appear to have been instilled in him at the family home 15-minutes from downtown Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. There, the family includes doctors, lawyers and engineers. His mother, Raoudha, and an aunt, who a reporter La Presse reporter met with Wednesday, wear their hair long. Their clothes are decidedly Western. And a 2008 portrait of Esseghaier hanging in the family living room shows him in year of his departure for Canada without the beard he sports today.

Esseghaier’s fellow students at the scientific institute in Tunis remembered him as impressionable but friendly — and a fan of Turkish and Western music, Reuters reported Thursday. He was also clueless about women.

“He did not know the difference between a condom and a packet of chewing gum,” said Meriam Sassi, a friend.

“He was a playful spirit, but he was a weak personality and it was easy to influence him,” said Samir Galouli, a 29-year-old engineer who studied with Esseghaier.

The Star reported on Thursday that investigators believe Esseghaier came into contact with an Al Qaeda operative in 2008 — before he came to Canada — and it was that encounter that put him on the Canadian intelligence radar. A formal investigation was launched after the student began behaving erratically during a flight from Canada to Cancun, Mexico, where he attended a scientific conference in May 2012.

Esseghaier also travelled to Iran within the past two years on a trip directly relevant to the investigation of the alleged plot, U.S. law enforcement and national security officials said Thursday.

They declined to say precisely when Esseghaier travelled to Iran, whether he had gone there more than once, or whom he was in contact with while there.

Police decided to arrest him, though, only after they noticed what has been described as a recent change in behaviour.

When they announced the arrest of Esseghaier and his alleged co-conspirator, Raed Jaser, this week, Canadian police said the two men had received “direction and guidance” in the plot from “al Qaeda elements in Iran.”

In the last few months Esseghaier has been travelling between Montreal and Toronto, one source with knowledge of the investigation told the Star Thursday. Without a home, he was reportedly sleeping wherever he could find somewhere to get a few hours of rest — sometimes curling up in public places.

Reports have suggested that in the days leading up to Monday’s arrest Esseghaier had spent an unusual amount of time riding Montreal’s subway system.

It is a fascinating—and still incomplete—story of a man alleged to have carried on a terrorist conspiracy from April 1, 2012 until Feb. 14, 2013 and, from September until just a few days before Christmas, counselled others to participate in terrorism.

Though his charges suggest he, rather than his co-accused, Toronto’s Raed Jaser, was the mastermind in the alleged plot, Esseghaier still cuts a confusing figure.

Ray Boisvert, a former assistant director at CSIS, said one of the unknowns in the case is when police allege Esseghaier began plotting. “Was he sent on a mission here or did he come over and get incensed?” he asked

Intelligence agencies have warned that while Al Qaeda as it existed before 9/11 is no more, they worry about smaller, less organized plots which take little planning but create mayhem, such as the Boston Marathon bombings earlier this month.

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